How The "Hinge Years" Led To Second World War | Titans Of The Century | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there some of the turning points of history just happen volcanoes erupt earthquakes floods and fires destroy cities but most of the turning points of history do not just happen this was their final power they are the result of actions taken by people the only thing we have to fear is fear itself they are the work of those who use power ambition belief to shape events people are the authors of history it's the curious thing about history that we all understand the great currents matter the institutions matter geography matters economics matters what natural resources you have matters but i do think there are moments in history when it really matters who's in power this is the story of the people who holding or reaching for power shaped our world the titans of the 20th century [Music] 1929 was ushered in with old lang sign or another local tradition ordinary people and titans alike raised their glasses but everything they knew was about to be changed forever [Music] some brief brackets of years deserve to be termed decisive the short span that includes the crash on wall street the start of the great depression the election of the greatest american president of the modern era and the arrival on the threshold of complete power of the german fuhrer zara steiner the great historian at cambridge calls the period from 1929 when the wall street crash happened to 1933 which really was the height of the great depression in the hinge years and i think she's really right these are the years that make things different the events of the hinges promoting titans into the spotlight transformed europe in 1929 mussolini was italian prime minister he was also head of eight ministries and was according to pope pius xi the man whom providence has sent us he eventually succeeds in 1929 in signing an agreement with the pope which effectively says the pope won't resist mussolini's political power but mussolini would at the same time respect the pope well the latter and pax essentially end a 50-year cold war between the institutions of the italian nation state and the vatican in a referendum on march 24th more than eight and a half million italians voted yes in support of the regime only one hundred and thirty-five thousand voted no ash's deity was constructed as an act of illusion a series of mirrors it was a stage set italy was not alone in living an illusion just before he died in october 1929 german chancellor gustav stresserman said the economic position is only flourishing on the surface germany is in fact dancing on a volcano and not just germany [Music] on the 23rd of october the chrysler building's stainless steel spire was fitted on the 24th black thursday three weeks after stresserman's death financiers poured millions in to try and arrest the stock market slide they failed you had this ruinous collapse in confidence in the stock market that eventually triggered the whole depression newly elected president herbert hoover put the crash down to unwarranted pessimism and fear [Music] fdr the man who will replace hoover in the white house is at this moment governor of new york he started giving radio talks as governor so many of the programs that we associate with his presidency and techniques that he used to govern he tried out as governor roosevelt was on his way joseph stalin was already in charge and the 21st of december 1929 was his 50th birthday [Music] so there's my daily plibura meetings with probably 240 items on the agenda and stein appeared to be across most of these he went through the files he was sent often scrolling on them in the margins with his blue crayon he seemed to be an absolute mastery writer he was often the the quickest person who could put into written form the compromise solution of what everybody wanted in 1929 the red army had 90 tanks four years later it would have 4 700. this increase in armaments was part of the industrialization of the soviet union part of the central planning that came at huge cost particularly in agriculture between 1929 and 1933 the biology weeks forced the peasants into collective farms which were run and controlled by the state they have to surrender most of their cattle most of the machinery to the collective farm for a time the focus returns to india and to one of the great pr exercises gandhi was really a genius of manipulating mass media if you like he was a genius of speaking to many different audiences and you should see this very clearly in the solstice of 1930. the salt tax cost the average indian at most 15 cents a year but salt was an essential of life and the british rule the raj had the monopoly salt was something that every indian household recognized so it was something that immediately connected the cause with everyday life for indians so he goes on this 200 mile march from his ashram in ahmedabad in western india down to the sea it's a fantastic piece of political drama and then his stroke of real media genius was that he invited foreign film crews to follow him and film him on this march in rising popular support the march was a success in stirring government it was a failure gandhi was getting under the skin of the british particularly of a man of limited influence who would before our story ends have become one of the very grandest of the titans churchill famously said you know india is no more a nation than the equator but it had no meaning as a nation so he completely dismissed indian nationalism great mismanagement and weakness are causing unrest through 300 million primitive people whose well-being is in our care he saw the movement of gandhi to get freedom and get independence as something deeply subversive to what he regarded as civilization in the soviet union by 1930 zinoviev kamenev bukharin trotsky and rykov were all gone 80 of soviet village churches had been closed stalin was in charge and soviet society was being remade but not without pain a thousand incidents of rural violence throughout the soviet union were officially reported in 1928 13 794 in 1930 they were objecting to coercion collectivization has been presented by some people as kind of an all-out war against the peasantry campaigns of soldiers groups of secret policemen sent in to compel people to join a collective farm on september the 14th 1930 the nazi breakthrough election was held in germany and it's only really after 1930 that hitler really registers on the radar the nazis climbed the ladder to second largest party in the reichstag roughly a quarter of those who voted nazi had never voted before the nazis very cleverly appealed to the nation and said you know we are a party in favor of the national community that was the slogan they used the folks coming shift so they were appealing saying we are the national party i'll see to it that prices remain stable hitler said in 1930 that's what my storm troopers are for there are no concrete measures for implementing these policies it's all about you know a general sense of vision he had his casting directors but fundamentally it was him he was the messianic leader so leader and message were the same thing generally his principles the supremacy of the nordic aryan race also that the jews and the plutocrats together would destroy german those are the constants they're always there they form his thinking as many as 34 000 national socialist meetings took place during the election campaign no other party got close after the brief military dictatorship of primo de rivera spain in 1931 held elections that were effectively a plebiscite on royal rule [Music] on the 12th of april 1931 there were municipal elections which was part of a scaled return to some kind of constitutional government after the military dictatorship which with alfonso the 13th approval had ruled spain since 1923. the elections decided that a better life would present itself if the king went away and alfonso the 13th departed noiselessly into exile it was a runaway victory for republican parties became editor of the left wing mundo abrero in 1931. she was also arrested as the reaction of the conservative establishment stiffened one priest not untypically suggested that spain should be prepared to fight a civil war before we tolerate the separation of church and state there were lots of machinations would it be possible to use the army and in the end a number of key generals said that slaughter would be beyond anything we are prepared to take responsibility for and franco was one of those franco of course would change his mind on his deathbed alfonso xiii who had thought as many many people on the right did in spain that the point of the civil war was to restore the monarchy alfonso the 13th said of franco he betrayed me at every turn with titans it seems always to be personal he betrayed me mussolini is always right stalin was the son and gandhi the great soul then there was the fuhrer [Music] the word fiora was really coined for him by dr goebbels but he embraced it the idea is that you get away from democratic north because the focus is leadership and there's also a providential element that comes into italy's language that he's the man of providence sent by god sent by providence to lead the people something happened in 1931 which could have derailed hitler before he took power on september 21st the monkano posts reported that hitler's niece had been found shot with hitler's gun in her hand that her nose was broken and regarding this mysterious affair the post continued informed sources tell us that on friday hitler and his niece had another fierce quarrel in a statement published in the post hitler denied everything and it all blew over and 42 year old adolf hitler began to see more of seventeen-year-old ava brown who would herself attempt suicide in 1932 the year in which nadezhda alleluia killed herself widowing joseph stalin it can be dangerous to get close to a titan [Music] in september 1931 a bomb exploded alongside the south manchurian railway the blast was the first bomb of a long war the last would drop on nagasaki on august ninth nineteen forty five [Music] foreign [Music] extending japan's territory beyond the borders of its concession by a full-scale invasion of manchuria doubled the size of the japanese empire the japanese military moved into manchuria in 1931 in defiance of orders from their own civilian government it had been planned by two relatively junior officers but within the space of about five to ten days they managed to occupy large parts of a region that is about the size of france and germany combined on september 22nd 1931 the american minister in china sent a telegram to the secretary of state it is my conviction he wrote that the steps taken in manchuria must fall within any definition of war the japanese invasion completely changed the geopolitical landscape of china the threat of full-scale war as the japanese extended their influence in northern china that created i think a pretty widespread feeling that the chinese should stand together but not yet to the extent that mao zedong and chiang kai-shek had stopped fighting each other [Music] elsewhere it was economics that was transforming the landscape this was a the period of the means test and the dough and the slag heaps and the rotting cranes and the jarrow hunger marches as chancellor winston churchill had disastrously returned britain to the gold standard on september 21st 1931 britain went off the gold standard by december the pound had fallen by 30 and the cost of unemployment benefits had risen from 12 million pounds in 1928 to 125 million pounds in 1931. [Music] leadership was required were the titans the right men you look at the 1920s and you think you know there were some good leaders there there was beyond in france there was strazimon in germany and you look at the disappearance of those people from the scene and you look at who is actually in power when a real crisis hits the world the real crisis that hits the world in this period is the great depression when mahatma gandhi sailed for london in august 1931 to attend the round table conference on the future of colonial india he was probably as famous as any person in the world the italian educator maria montessori wrote everybody knows him even the smallest child everyone exclaims in his own language that is gandhi everyone except churchill who opposing the conference called gandhi a seditious middle temple lawyer now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east [Music] on december 10th gandhi spoke in geneva i regard myself as a soldier through a shoulder of peace gandhi's quite a big presence at the league of nations there's no accident there's a great big statue of him in there in the gardens of the palais de nacion we have resorted to means that our scrupulously non-violent and peaceful said gandhi in his speech and strangers have testified and i am here to give my testimony that in a great measure we seem to have succeeded in attaining our goal he exaggerated [Music] some titans have a towering but local presence charles de gaulle for example who in 1932 began work on his third book towards a professional army which would confirm his ascendancy and in hong kong ho chi minh was arrested by the british and jailed for two years that's how revolutionaries are made a man whose local influence was at least as intense was sentenced to death for his role in the easter uprising commuted to life in prison and freed under the amnesty in 1932 he attained high office eamon devalera was an austere and school mastery figure but he was a brilliant politician and in many ways he becomes the dominant figure in irish politics when he is elected premier in 1932 and the ireland that you see for the next 30 years is the iron that has been created by ayman de valera the emperor hirohito survived an assassination attempt by a korean nationalist in january 1932. the japanese prime minister inukai suyoshi offered his resignation because of the security lapse it was not accepted on may 15th young navy officers assassinated the prime minister his offence was a reluctance to recognize japanese possession of manchuria you know [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] it is quite difficult to write japanese history as the history of great men because in my view it is institutions of the social structures that are much better explainers of why things tended to evolve from may 1932 civilian politicians were confined to minor roles in japanese cabinets unsurprisingly military expenditure began to climb by 1938 it was twelve times what it had been in nineteen thirty one [Music] in 1933 japan would quit the league of nations and a figure who will become prominent in our story move to the front of dwight d eisenhower makes a brief and controversial appearance at the end of july when president hoover sends troops to disperse several thousand first world war veterans assembled in washington to demand payment of the war service bonus chief of staff general douglas macarthur led the 12th infantry regiment the third cavalry regiment containing six renault tanks was commanded by major george s patton eisenhower macarthur's junior aide remembered telling that dumb son of a [ __ ] not to go down there i told him it was no place for the chief of staff the action was the final nail in hoover's coffin was this the american dream had this come to an end the need for strong executive leadership was as great as it's been in just a few times in american history his opponent for the 1932 presidential campaign had as his signature tune happy days are here again his name was franklin delano roosevelt his health wasn't an issue in 1932 when he ran for president but he was very good at dispelling those concerns roosevelt swept hoover aside in the most one-sided election since lincoln's victory in 1864. [Applause] fdr's response was in many ways to remake america it was called the new deal you've been told that things may be worse if i'm elected to others but on the other hand remember that things might have been a whole lot better he gives off the impression in the 1930s when he's running for president and once he's elected that nothing can scare him he's seen the worst the ability that gives him to empathize with others who are going through hardship and to recognize to experience hardship is often not of one's own making or one's own fault and that one needs assistance this is what makes him the extraordinary man he became as the votes for fdr were tallied america was in a desperate state over 11 000 banks had gone under between 1929 1933 the country was in complete financial paralysis elected in november 1932 roosevelt would be sworn in and take office in march 1933. [Music] [Applause] two elections were held in germany in 1932. the first for president and the second for the reichstag hitler contested both he was defeated in the presidential election by hindenburg he got nearly 13 and a half million votes in the second round but that was only 36 percent against the old man's 53. paul ludwig hands anton von benickendorff and von hindenburg was born in 1847. hindenbury absolutely did not want to run for re-election in 1932. he was in his mid-80s but the thing was his chancellor at that time heinrich rooney understood that if hindenburg didn't run hitler probably would and hitler would stand a very good chance of getting elected president [Applause] [Music] in the federal election in july a swing to the nazis made them the largest single party an electoral success that owed a great deal to the party's chief propagandist joseph goebbels goebbels played an enormous part i think absolutely central part in generating this terrific sense of momentum and by 1931 32 he was creating this sense that the party was on some sort of unstoppable process in 1932 he was using the aeroplane so that he could speak in four or five places in the same day they simply outpaced all of the other parties [Applause] electoral success revealed the nazis to be in richard j evans phrase a rainbow coalition of the discontented but their vote was not overwhelming and we won't get an absolute majority this way gerb was confided to his diary in italy of course the leadership cult was already firmly established with mussolini he had a cult of personality and one of its roles was to make sure people thought he had charisma he was said to be able to cure infertility to stop the mountains from crumbling claimed that his policies though he did not always clearly articulate what they were would ensure the moral and material grandeur of the italian people [Music] fascism wasn't a dogma it was a dynamic it was a a form of activism and that was really what counted as far as the populace of italy was concerned and it was broadcast the policies were mussolini carefully explained aristocratic and democratic conservative and progressive reactionary and revolutionary a lot of foreign commentators will come up with a view that mussolini is a dictator and dictators are really not very nice but on the other hand the italians are hopeless disorganised people and you might as well have a dictator there the orchestrated elevation of stalin beyond the horizon of mere humanity cranked into overdrive in 1932 he wasn't a great speaker but he could write drafts i think stalin did have an underlying philosophy but of course i think he also enjoyed power it gets very entangled doesn't it i mean you have a vision of what you want to do and you think you're the only person who can do it alexander woolcott writing from moscow in 1932 noted i have been here long enough to learn what the major industry of soviet russia is it is printing pictures of stalin what stalin seemed unable to solve was the general failure of collectivization they did collectivize which i think was a very risky thing because they did this very rapidly as a kind of police operation poly bureau document number 93 of december 6th called upon all collective and private farmers who are honest and dedicated to soviet rule to organize all their efforts for a merciless struggle against culax the problem with this term about kulak is how do you define a kulak how do you work out uh who akulak was that was partly a question of local popularity who resisted the most who it was convenient to find as the example to be made it wasn't always easy to spot who this rich class of peasant were you could easily become labeled a kulak by just having two cows instead of the average one that hardly makes you a major capitalist right [Music] the hinge swings a year of destiny dawns in 1933 hitler and roosevelt will join mussolini and stalin as titans in power shots had been fired at the president-elect on february 15th by an unemployed bricklayer giuseppe joe zangara roosevelt is traveling around florida with anton cermak the mayor of chicago who had been extraordinarily helpful during the campaign and out of the crowd an assassin emerges not more than 10 feet away from roosevelt in an open car then above the mayhem a voice could be heard loud and clear i'm all right roosevelt shouted i'm all right thank god the assassin was a terrible shot fired six to eight shots all of which miss roosevelt but they kill cermak chief justice charles evans hughes administered the oath on a dutch bible which had been in the roosevelt family for 300 states years help me god 1933 inaugural address that morning the new york stock exchange had closed this is the time to speak the truth frankly and boldly the line that he's the most famous for is the only thing we have to fear is fear itself but the line that got the greatest applause was this nation is calling for action and action now and by the time the roosevelt takes office the banks of the banks have collapsed unemployment has unimaginable levels fdr's first action as president was to close the banks until march 9. he called for a temporary bank holiday until congress could convene to pass an emergency banking bill when that bill passed a few days later it passed on a voice vote and that really sparked the hundred days the first hundred days it's just an extraordinary period in american history we get the passage of 15 major pieces of legislation it's just unheard of in 1932 there were about 20 million radio receivers in the world 16 million of them were in the usa on sunday march 12th roosevelt began the first of his radio broadcast fireside chats with my friends i want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the united states about banking and here you see you don't have a massive number of competing channels or anything like that when roosevelt addresses the nation all of the nation listens and this is how he taught them softly through the horrors of the great depression and it is my belief that during the past week has become an exceedingly unfashionable pastime 60 million people were listening including the humorist will rogers who said the president had taken the subject of banking and made everyone understand it even the bankers so although we're used to thinking the fireside chats as these major moments of presidential leadership there are surprisingly few so he would ration them so that people would actually china the president must have something important to say you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses let us unite in banishing fear the day after the president's speech americans were queuing to put their money back where their president promised them it would be safe two days later the new york stock exchange reopened after a 10-day hiatus and the dow lept 15 the largest single day rise in its history the stock exchange ticker tape signed off with the words happy days are here again [Music] by april more than a billion dollars had been pulled out of socks jars from under mattresses and floorboards and put back in the banks about 450 000 americans wrote to their new president in his first week in office during hoover's presidency one person worked in the white house mailroom for fdr the staff had to be increased to 70. when the world gathered for an economic conference that summer fdr scuttled the initiative with what has come to be known as his bombshell message he made it plain that fixing the national economy took precedence over an international arrangement [Music] if you've got one third of your population out of work you don't have money or time or energy or interest left to build a navy to build an army to worry too much about foreign affairs the british economist john maynard keynes said that roosevelt was magnificently right but the alternatives to joint action included nazism fascism and japanese militarism so the tragedy of the world economic conference is that the three major democratic powers aren't able to do an economic and a financial deal the americans had hoped to do a trade deal with the british and the british don't want to do the deal neville chamberlain who's the chance to vic's checker at the world economic conference he's the one that roosevelt blames for this bust up until chamberlain leaves his prime minister they have very difficult relations all the way through the 1930s in july 1932 hitler had been denied the chancellorship by the reich president there were several occasions in 1932 when hindenburg was presented with the idea of naming hitler as chancellor and refused to do so and it really comes back to the utter contempt that someone in his position had for what he saw as this vulgar lower class upstart [Music] five months later and with nazi support dwindling in the november election a swing against them of more than four percent had been recorded hindenburg relented i don't think hindenburg thought about reasoning with hitler i don't think hindenburg thought about reasoning with anybody he did ultimately come to the conclusion that he could give hitler orders and finally at the end in late january 1933 that proved to be enough if you look at how hitler actually got into power it was a result of human error but it was for the people around president hindenburg his son among them who felt they could use hitler and use the nazis of course the fatal mistake they made was not to understand that hitler was thinking exactly the same thing hindenburg's chancellor franz joseph hermann michael maria von papenzu kerningen had been born into nobility and wealth [Music] so with von poppins just like with hindenburg there's a lot of sort of aristocratic pride and arrogance hitler almost certainly had nothing but contempt for von poppin to be honest poppin deserved a little more than contempt after the election cunningly as they thought hindenburg and his circle invited hitler to become chancellor and within two months pepin said we will have pushed hitler so far into a corner that he will squeak and it's no accident i think that when the weimar republic ended in 1933 it ended through a small conspiracy by those conservative elites at half past 11 on the morning of monday january 30th 1933 one of those rare dates that divides history president paul von hindenburg administered the oath of office installing adolf hitler as chancellor so the moment in which he becomes chancellor of germany in 1933 would be a good candidate for the most important historical moment of the 20th century barely a month later just after midnight on the evening of 27th february 1933 passersby saw flames beginning to light up the interior of the reichstag arriving on the scene hitler confided in sefton delma reporting for the london daily express you are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in german history here delma the next morning the cabinet which had a non-nazi majority met to draw up an emergency decree that abrogated civil liberties across germany the decree which is passed following the reichstag fire basically allows his right government to take over state governments and the state governments were one of the possible sources of resistance which hitler then wipes out gurbu's reich's ministry for popular culture and propaganda was formally launched on march 13th 1933. he established in 1933 the so-called reich chamber of culture with the aim of trying to control and coordinate and support and sponsor german culture on march the 23rd the enabling act gave hitler dictatorial powers the sa and the ss were given sort of free run to deal with the left so they arrested the socialist and communist leaders the first concentration camp intended for communist party functionaries was set up on march 22nd outside a town named dachau there were a lot of concentration camps in the spring of 1933 and these were often simply sellers somewhere or derelict factories which they used to hold these people and beat them up hitler's only been in power not even two months yet at that point and he's already maneuvered himself out of this limited position he was in he's already broken out of the box he's already basically got dictatorial power in his hands on march 5th 1933 before striding onto the stage at the berlin sports palace adolf hitler had told cornelius vanderbilt jr to tell america that he was sent by the almighty to a nation that had been threatened with disintegration on october 14th hitler announced the dissolution of the reichstag setting fresh elections for november 12th it was not properly an election rather it was a vote of confidence and 92.1 of the electorate declared their confidence in hitler winston churchill speaking in the house of commons on november 7th warned that germany had already started to rearm march 1933 was the epicenter of the great and vicious ukraine famine this famine it is called the holodon war so it was not something which was a result of collectivization natural research or bad harvest was the attempted genocide the soviet leadership doesn't support the ukrainian peasants the backbone of the ukrainian nation they let them die to the very last moment actually they prevent grain from being released to them in january janus radzu tax who would be a victim of the show trials said of stalin he is the leader of the most revolutionary most militant party in the world and he would not be the leader if he didn't know how to chop off and destroy that which is slated for destruction he kept power because he never took responsibility for anything that went wrong if something went wrong if there was famine in ukraine he blamed foreign agents or he blamed dissonant ukrainians and enough people in the soviet union were prepared to believe that trains are starving in masses as cannibalism it's a terrible situation but stalin ignored that and said there is no crisis people believe what they want to believe on april 1 1933 adolf hitler ordered a one-day boycott of jewish shops people believed it was necessary 1933 was the year in which the cinema box office bottomed out walt disney's three little pigs premiered helping the recovery the song that made its debut in that production was reputedly often whistled by adolf hitler whose nickname had been wolf it was who's afraid of the big bad wolf [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, war economy, franklin d rosevelt, fdr, president fdr, josef stalin, ww2 documentary, hitler documentary, hitler's germany

Id: 1M1IeHl_N5s

Length: 50min 2sec (3002 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021